An auditable data pipeline for financial reporting

Redbooth is an ambitious communication and collaboration platform.
Targeting businesses of all sizes, they offer a comprehensive solution
for teams ranging from project management to collaboration and
videoconferencing.

Their technical team was delivering features at a great pace, but as
their customer base grew, so did the needs of every other part of the
business, including sales and customer support. At this point, they had
a growing backlog of internal projects that were crucial for the other
teams to catch up with the rapid growth.

Together with the client's technical leadership, we agreed on the right
architecture and began working. Over the course of the project, we
delivered four key integrations.

On one hand, the sales team being slowed down by unreliable data —after
we fixed the integration with Salesforce and improved on it, they got
back on track. On the other, the customer support team were struggling
with unreliable data too, and lacking a lot of context when dealing with
requests. We integrated their platform, Zendesk, with existing customer
data to provide a comprehensive picture whenever a request came in,
helping improve both quality and speed of their operations.

We established a business metrics system to support the product
department.

We also tackled some user experience issues with payments and invoicing,
migrating all paying customers to the new pricing structure on a
completely new platform, with zero downtime. By doing that, we were able
to improve the way end users accessed their invoice data and connect it
to the CRM for the sales team to analyze.

Finally, we set up a data pipeline for business metrics, which enabled
product owners to make better decisions on a complex and growing
product, before handing over the project with excellent documentation
and technical talks delivered to the existing developer team.

The pains of growth

Thanks to the success of their product and their expansion to the
vibrant US market through San Francisco, Redbooth was growing by leaps
and bounds. Customers were demanding new features, and their development
team was delivering them as fast as they possibly could.

Having disconnected data is normal at an early stage startup — having a
few manual processes and relying on vision and gut feeling for
developing a good product is often enough. However, when you start
growing, the real challenges begin.

The sales team had unreliable data from a faulty integration with
Salesforce —having to periodically cross-check with other sources, which
was a major slowdown. Whenever a support ticket was filed, the customer
support team had to spend precious time chasing down customer data to
get enough context to fulfill the request. On top of this, an old
payment system was preventing from switching to a new pricing structure
and integrating a lot of financial data with the other parts of the
company.

But all this disconnected data affected the product team too —without
detailed business metrics, understanding how users were using the
product and the impact of certain features had become a lot harder over
time.

"After we fully migrated all paying customers over to Chargify with zero
downtime, the new structure was live and customers were delighted"

Supporting each and every department

After discussing with the CTO which architectural choices were better
suited for the needs they had, we began by establishing a business
metrics system to support the product department.

Tackling the data integrations was the next priority. We enhancing a
faulty Zendesk integration and brought in customer data from their CRM,
so that every support ticket had the necessary context to be dispatched
more quickly and effectively.

Then we realized that their old payment system was holding them back
from rolling out their new pricing structure, and at the same time it
made it hard for their customers to access their own invoices. After we
fully migrated all paying customers over to Chargify with zero downtime,
the new structure was live and customers were delighted. Additionally it
made it easier for us to integrate the newly available financial data
with the CRM for the sales department —they were happy to get an even
richer picture of their paying customers.

Along the way, whenever we needed to refactor or adapt part of the
original codebase to improve integrations, working with their team was
frictionless, thanks to the fact that there was a good alignment in
terms of development methodology. Occasionally, we would review their
code and share some best practices.

To ensure a smooth hand-over, not only we delivered comprehensive
technical documentation, but also technical talks to their team, walking
them through the architecture of the new systems and their extensibility
points.

A metrics-driven business with an extraordinary growth

With all these data integrations and support tools complete, every
department was much better equipped to deal with the growth of their
customer base.

The product team got better insights into how features are being used,
the sales team was operating more smoothly and with a lot more data to
support them, and the customer support team could attend more requests,
with richer context.

And most importantly, happy users continue to be the driver of sustained
growth at Redbooth.

"With all these data integrations and support tools complete, every
department was much better equipped to deal with the growth of their
customer base"

Company type

Productivity and Collaboration

Solution

Data engineering

Software Architecture & Development

Outcome

Each department became more productive and effective thanks to the new reliable integrations and business metrics system, having a multiplying effect in Redbooth's ability to scale as a business.